I rather liked GNOME 2. GNOME 3 limitations (for my use) have been so significant that I can’t even comfortably use Cinnamon (it inherits some limitations from GNOME 3) so I’m still using Mate. The main discomfort this causes me in F20 is lack of bluetooth support.

Theodore Ts’o

After listening to +Karen Sandler’s talk at LinuxCon EU about how GNOME has an unfair reputation, I thought I would take a closer look at GNOME 3.14.   Looking at some initial research, it looks like the extensions that provide (or might provide; it’s hard to tell because they aren’t documented all that well) a static set of workspaces which are laid out in a two-dimensional grid haven’t yet been ported to GNOME 3.14, and one of them had an advertisement explicitly stating that it was very likely it would break with every new GNOME release.

Dear Lazy G+, does anyone know if you can make 2-D static workspaces work with GNOME 3.14?   And if so, what magic secret registry settings I might need to make something that works mostly like XFCE?   (i.e., I want control over whether closing the lid suspends the laptop or not, etc., configurable panes on the left and right hand sides where I can control which launchers go where on the panels, the ability to configure keyboard shortcuts for moving between workspaces, moving windows between workstations via up, down, left, right arrows, etc., keyboard shortcuts for locking the screen, manually suspending the laptop, etc.)

If the answer is that GNOME doesn’t let me do any of these things, or in a way that isn’t guaranteed to not to randomly break from GNOME version to GNOME version, that’s fine.   But I’ll keep repeating the meme that GNOME is power user hostile — or at least, hostile to this power user.  :-)

Curtis Olson October 18, 2014 07:02

I’ve been using gnome 3 on fedora 20 for quite some time without too much grief. I’ve never done 2d workspace arrangement though, just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, …. You can setup keyboard hotkeys to switch between workspaces: <alt-1> <alt-2> …. That said, I don’t do too much laptop work, mostly desktop work. It handles my 3 display setup really well. I had a minor panic attack going from gnome 2->3 when I lost my 100’s of jumbled desktop icons that were all mostly already long forgotten. And losing the windows-style start menu was traumatic as well for about a week. I don’t miss those things any more though …

Michael K Johnson October 18, 2014 15:28

I want a panel on each monitor. I am not the target audience.

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